Real-world BPEL recipes for SOA integration and Composite Application development

Combining business process management and web services orchestration

Techniques and best practices with downloadable code samples from ten real-world case studies

In DetailService Oriented Architecture is generating a buzz across the whole IT industry. Propelled by standards-based technologies like XML, Web Services, and SOAP, SOA is quickly moving from pilot projects to mainstream applications critical to business operations. One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL).

BPEL was created to enable effective composition of web services in a service-oriented environment. In the past two years, BPEL has become the most significant standard to elevate the visibility of SOA from IT to business level. BPEL is not only commoditizing the integration market, but it is also offering organizations a whole new level of agility – ability to rapidly change applications in response to the changing business landscape. BPEL enables organizations to automate their business processes by orchestrating services within and across the firewall. It forces organizations to think in terms of services. Existing functionality is exposed as services. New applications are composed using services. Communication with external vendors and partners is through services. Services are reused across different applications. Services are, or should be, everywhere!

What you will learn from this book?

In the Packt book Business Process Execution Language for Web Services by Matjaz Juric, we learnt about the building blocks and how these technologies could be used to build a simple SOA solution. As organizations increase their SOA footprint, IT Managers, Architects, and developers are starting to realize that the impact of SOA on IT and business operations can be immense. After having gained confidence with web services, they want to take it to the next level. However, adopters are challenged with some basic questions – How do I SOA-enable my existing integration investment? Can I build flexible and agile business processes? How can I administer my SOA environment without spending a fortune? There have been various best practices defined around SOA, but to date these have been somewhat abstract and lacking a real-world basis. The IT community is looking for real-world examples; examples of how other companies are embarking on an SOA initiative and how to apply that industry learning to their own projects.

What makes this a Cookbook? After you have been exposed to the different ingredients (BPEL, WSDL, and web services), this book takes the adventure to the next level by helping you cook new recipes (SOA applications) using efficient kitchen techniques (best practices). 10 SOA practitioners have gotten together to share their SOA best practices and provide practical viewpoints to tackle many of the common problems SOA promises to solve. Their recommendations are based on projects in production; their existing projects could be your next ones. Through this process you’ll learn the techniques and gain the confidence to create and deliver the recipe that’s right for your particular situation.

Who this book is written for?

This book is aimed at architects and developers building applications in Service Oriented Architecture. The book presumes knowledge of BPEL, SOA, XML, web services, and multi-tier architectures.